"KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. This update is the first in a series of stabilization updates to 4.5.0, coming every month, as if delivered by a cronjob. 4.5.1 brings bugfixes and translation updates on top of KDE SC 4.5.0."

In my case, on several distros (Fedora, OpenSuse, Pardus) and with default settings, X shows a pretty dark screen when launched, and then the computer becomes unresponsive (ie Ctl+Alt+Fx things won't work, power button won't shut the machine down, and so on).

Tried to update NVidia and intel drivers to the latest release, no luck. Tried to force X to use the nvidia proprietary driver, no luck (no card detected). Tried with intel, no luck either (same symptom). 640x480 generic driver (VGA ?) kind of works, but it's just useless (insanely high screen brightness that can't be changed, eats up a fully charged battery in less than 2 hours, no room on screen, ugliness).

So I'll just consider that support for my hardware is not ready yet Some years ago, I'd have fought with the command line until it works, but now I'm tired of this : either it works out of the box/with simple fixes or it doesn't work.

I will tell it again and again and again. The problem is that gfx and other devices do not conform to a standard that would help create cross-OS drivers targeting the standard and not vendors. No matter how good are the programmers the Linux/Haiku/Solaris .... drivers will be crippled. We need one standard, like VESA, for capabilites exposed by the HW to the OS developer that should encompass GPUs and APUs (AMD's terminology). You just swap the GFX, not the drivers.

I would love it if a well-known standard like VESA or OpenGL specified how software communicates with hardware for 3D acceleration too, but I think it's a dream. Hobby OSs should do their best with VESA standards and forget 3D acceleration until they've got sufficient momentum.